Nate Silver Fact: He Also Predicts Oscar Winners

He’s proven that he can pick the winners of Presidential elections, but can Five Thirty-Eight blogger Nate Silver do the same for the Academy Awards? After two earlier, quasi-successful attempts, he’s trying again with this year’s awards and picking favorites for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress and the supporting categories for the latter two, as well. Spoilers: It’s looking good for movies based on historical events.

Based on past performance, Silver created a model of the most historically reliable awards — apparently, the Directors Guild of America scores particularly highly in terms of Best Picture predictions — and uses that to choose his winners. “[O]ur forecasts for the Academy Awards are based on which candidates have won other awards in their category,” Silver explained. “We give more weight to awards that have frequently corresponded with the Oscar winners in the past, and which are voted on by people who will also vote for the Oscars. We don’t consider any statistical factors beyond that, and we doubt that doing so would provide all that much insight.”

Silver’s earlier attempts to map out the big winners at the Oscars have met with less success than his predictions for who’ll end up the Leader of The Free World, however, with the author of The Signal and The Noiseadmitting that his nine-out-of-twelve rate is “not bad, but also not good enough to suggest that there is any magic formula for this.”

The problem, says Silver, is the lack of reliable polling before the event. While elections are trailed by multiple polls on a regular basis, those attempting to predict the outcome of the Oscars are stuck looking at other awards and polls of critics’ favorite movies of the year, which tend to be far less reliable. “These patterns aren’t random,” Silver points out, however. “The main reason that some awards perform better is because some of them are voted on by people who will also vote for the Oscars.”

So, who, exactly, does Silver pick for each category? Here are his selections:

Best Picture: Argo

Best Director: Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

Best Actor: Daniel Day Lewis, Lincoln

Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook

Best Supporting Actor: Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln

Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables

Judging from the pre-ceremony buzz, these predictions follow conventional wisdom with the potential substitution of Jones in the Supporting Actor category for the much-discussed Robert De Niro (Silver Linings Playbook). Of course, if one thing is true of the Academy Awards, it’s the ever-present possibility of a last minute upset, so we’ll have to wait a couple of days to see whether or not Silver has figured out the formula for show business as well as electoral politics.